Newsom’s Fmr Mistress Speaks, Claims Kamala Harris Told Her to ‘Just Pause’
Ruby Rippey Tells Her Full Side of the Gavin Newsom Affair - and It Complicates a Scandal He Thought Was Settled
Newsom admitted the affair nearly two decades ago. What is new is Rippey's account of how long it lasted, how addiction and workplace power shaped it, why she stayed mostly quiet, and why his 2026 memoir finally pushed her to answer.
The scandal had been reduced to a paragraph. Then Ruby Rippey read it.
For Gavin Newsom, one of the most damaging episodes of his early political career had become old history.
He admitted it publicly in 2007. He apologized. He sought treatment for alcohol abuse. He survived the scandal, won reelection as San Francisco mayor by an overwhelming margin, and continued climbing through California politics.
Nearly two decades later, the episode appeared again in Newsom's 2026 memoir, Young Man in a Hurry.
Newsom called what happened with his former aide Ruby Rippey "the stupidest and also briefest of affairs" and described it as the worst betrayal of his life.
Rippey read those pages and decided the compressed version no longer felt sufficient.
On July 28, she published a first-person essay in Vanity Fair giving the most detailed public account yet of the relationship, her alcoholism, the collapse of her marriage, her recovery and the way she now thinks about the power difference between herself and the man who was both her boss and the mayor of San Francisco.
The essay does not transform an unknown rumor into a new scandal.
The affair itself has been public for 19 years, and Newsom has never denied it.
What Rippey changes is the texture of the story - and, in several places, the way Newsom has chosen to tell it.
What was already established long before 2026
The core facts were never really in dispute after February 2007.
Rippey worked in Newsom's administration, ultimately serving as his appointments secretary. Her then-husband, Alex Tourk, was one of Newsom's closest political allies, serving as a deputy chief of staff and later managing the mayor's reelection campaign.
Newsom and Rippey had an affair while she was married to Tourk.
Newsom's own marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle was already ending: the couple announced in January 2005 that they were separating and filing for divorce. The divorce did not become final until February 2006.
That timeline matters because the affair began in the summer of 2005.
Newsom was separated from Guilfoyle but was still legally married when Rippey says the relationship began. Rippey remained married to Tourk.
When the affair became public in 2007, Newsom did not attempt to deny it.
Standing before reporters at City Hall, he said that everything the public had heard and read about the affair was true and apologized for what he called a personal lapse in judgment.
Days later, he announced that he would seek treatment for alcohol abuse, while explicitly saying alcohol was not an excuse for his conduct.
Politically, the scandal did not end his career.
In November 2007, San Francisco voters reelected Newsom with 73.66% of the vote.
Rippey's new account begins with alcohol - but not with an excuse
The most vivid passages in Rippey's essay are also the easiest to sensationalize.
She describes the relationship beginning around a City Hall colleague's wedding in Napa Valley on July 2, 2005, after a day of heavy drinking.
Her memory of that night is fragmented. She recalls drinking champagne and wine, riding in Newsom's chauffeured car with other people, and later waking beside him in a hotel room still wearing her clothes after having passed out.
That scene is striking, but Rippey's own account does not say that a sexual encounter occurred while she was unconscious.
She repeatedly and explicitly describes the broader relationship as consensual.
In her essay, she says she was not coerced, knew what she was doing and often engineered opportunities to see Newsom again.
The affair developed over the weeks that followed. Rippey writes that the two met on and off for months, including at Newsom's Russian Hill home, a private room at a North Beach bar and a Los Angeles hotel.
Alcohol runs through her description of nearly every stage of the relationship.
But one of the most important corrections to the more sensational retellings is that Rippey does not say the affair created her addiction.
Her drinking problem predated Newsom by years. She writes about earlier DUIs, stretches of attempted sobriety and escalating substance abuse before and during the relationship.
She eventually entered rehabilitation in May 2006 for problems involving alcohol and cocaine.
Rippey says Newsom drank with her; in her essay, she describes cocaine use as her own.
Her conclusion is unusually direct: the affair did not derail her life by itself. Her alcoholism did, and the affair gave that addiction another place to operate.
The new account does not fit neatly into either a victim story or a blame-the-aide story
Rippey's essay is difficult to reduce to a familiar political script because she rejects both extremes.
She does not describe herself as a powerless victim who was forced into a relationship with a powerful man.
She also no longer believes the power difference between them was irrelevant.
In 2018, when the affair resurfaced during Newsom's campaign for governor and the #MeToo movement was reshaping public debate about workplace relationships, Rippey publicly pushed back on attempts to place her experience in that category.
She wrote that she was a subordinate but also a "free-thinking" 33-year-old married woman and mother, and said she could not blame someone else for her role in what happened.
Her 2026 essay preserves that sense of personal responsibility.
She says she made choices, hurt her husband and actively pursued Newsom's attention.
But she adds a second conclusion that is more pointed about Newsom's role as her boss.
Rippey writes that power does not have to involve coercion to matter. In her view, the person holding greater authority had a responsibility to maintain the boundary - and did not.
Her formulation is essentially that two things can be true at the same time.
She was responsible for her own conduct.
And Newsom, as the mayor and her superior, carried a different level of responsibility for a workplace boundary that collapsed.
That distinction is far more precise than either calling the affair coercive or pretending the workplace hierarchy was meaningless.
Her marriage - not Newsom's political career - absorbed the biggest immediate cost
Rippey's account repeatedly returns to one person: Alex Tourk.
At the time of the affair, Tourk was not merely her husband. He was one of Newsom's closest friends and political operatives.
Rippey says she entered rehab without telling Tourk about the affair because her treatment team feared the public consequences could threaten her recovery.
After leaving rehab, she remained sober while Tourk continued working for Newsom, still unaware that his wife had been involved with his boss.
Rippey says she eventually told her husband herself in January 2007, sending an email from her parents' home in Napa admitting that she had been having sex with the mayor on and off for months.
Tourk left the marriage and soon resigned from Newsom's political operation.
The couple later divorced.
Rippey now says the greatest consequence was not the headlines or the loss of her City Hall career. It was what she did to Tourk and to the life they had been building.
Over time, they rebuilt a relationship as co-parents. Both remarried, and Rippey says they eventually became close again.
She has now been sober for 20 years.
The sharpest dispute with Newsom is not whether the affair happened - it is who gets to narrate what followed
Newsom's memoir did not deny the betrayal.
In fact, he described it in intensely negative terms.
But Rippey objects to two parts of his version.
The first is the phrase "the briefest of affairs."
Her account describes encounters continuing intermittently for months, from the summer of 2005 until before she entered rehab in May 2006.
That does not necessarily mean Newsom's word "briefest" is mathematically false - it is a subjective description.
But the phrase creates a different impression from a relationship that Rippey says repeatedly resumed over a period of months.
The second disagreement is more concrete.
Newsom's memoir says he "came clean" to Tourk.
Rippey says she had already confessed to her husband before Tourk confronted Newsom.
Her Vanity Fair account describes sending Tourk an email on January 13, 2007, then says Tourk later requested a meeting with the mayor after learning the truth.
Rippey does not accuse Newsom of inventing the entire sequence.
She says his phrasing is technically defensible but leaves the impression that he was the person who first told Tourk what happened.
That is the kind of disagreement that seems small in a memoir but large to the person whose marriage was destroyed by the event.
Kamala Harris did call Rippey - but the evidence does not show a coordinated cover-up
The most politically explosive name in Rippey's essay may not be Newsom's.
It is Kamala Harris.
Rippey says she knew Harris from their earlier years in San Francisco government, when both had connections to Mayor Willie Brown's administration. By 2007, Harris was San Francisco's district attorney.
After the scandal became public, Rippey says Harris called her.
Rippey told Harris that people were encouraging her to speak publicly and that a publisher had offered her an advance to write a memoir at a moment when she was newly sober, broke and struggling to find work.
According to Rippey's account, Harris advised her not to speak immediately and suggested that time would give her better perspective.
Rippey says she took the advice.
More importantly, she describes it as the best advice she received at the time.
That is very different from evidence that Harris was dispatched by Newsom, the Democratic Party or a political operation to silence Rippey.
Rippey's essay does not say Harris threatened her, offered her anything, demanded secrecy or said she was protecting Newsom.
It says Harris listened to a newly sober woman considering a paid memoir and told her to wait until she had more perspective.
Readers are free to debate whether a politician advising another political insider to remain silent had political benefits.
But describing the call as documented proof of coordinated Democratic "damage control" goes beyond the evidence currently available.
Rippey was not completely silent for two decades
The phrase "breaking her silence" is broadly understandable because the Vanity Fair essay is Rippey's first long, detailed account.
It is not literally true that she said nothing publicly between 2007 and 2026.
In 2018, she issued the public statement defending her own agency and questioning whether #MeToo applied to her relationship with Newsom.
She also said at the time that the affair and the public fallout had destroyed her marriage and that sobriety had allowed her to rebuild her life.
What she had not done was narrate the relationship scene by scene, explain how her addiction intersected with it, describe the Harris call in detail or directly challenge Newsom's memoir version.
That is what makes the 2026 essay new.
It is not the first time Rippey has spoken.
It is the first time she has taken control of the full narrative.
Newsom's response is essentially: I admitted this years ago
Newsom's office has not challenged Rippey's sobriety, her description of the affair as consensual or her right to tell her story.
His spokesperson, Izzy Gardon, responded by pointing back to the public record.
The governor acknowledged his role and apologized nearly two decades ago, the statement said. He later met his current wife, started a family, addressed the episode again in his memoir and does not have anything further to add.
That response reflects Newsom's strongest defense politically.
This is not misconduct he concealed until a presidential campaign forced it into the open.
He admitted the affair in 2007, apologized, discussed it again during the 2018 governor's race and voluntarily included it in a memoir published before any 2028 campaign announcement.
For supporters, that history supports an argument that the episode is an old personal failure for which Newsom already took public responsibility.
For critics, Rippey's new account raises a different question: whether Newsom's later retelling compresses the duration, minimizes the workplace power dynamic and gives him more credit than Rippey believes he deserves for disclosing the betrayal.
Those are questions about character and narrative control rather than newly discovered criminal conduct.
The political timing is real even if Rippey says the memoir - not a campaign calendar - pushed her to write
Rippey's essay arrived at an awkward moment for Newsom.
He is finishing his final year as California governor and openly considering a presidential run in 2028.
Newsom has said publicly that he would be lying if he claimed he was not considering a White House campaign after the 2026 midterms.
His memoir itself has been widely interpreted as part autobiography, part political introduction to voters outside California.
That makes every personal chapter in the book politically relevant whether Newsom intended it that way or not.
But it would be unfair to state as fact that Rippey waited until 2028 speculation intensified in order to damage a presidential campaign.
Her own essay identifies a more immediate trigger.
In January 2026, a Newsom adviser called to tell her she would appear in the governor's forthcoming memoir.
After she read the pages, she concluded that the version in which she appeared did not fully match the story she had lived.
That is the explanation she gives for speaking at length now.
The fact that the essay may affect Newsom's national ambitions is obvious.
The claim that damaging those ambitions was Rippey's motive is not established.
The scandal survived once. The 2028 question is whether the standards around it have changed
Newsom already faced voters after the affair became public.
San Francisco reelected him by a landslide in 2007.
California voters were reminded of the scandal during the #MeToo era in 2018 and elected him governor anyway.
That history makes predictions about 2028 difficult.
Some Democratic voters may view the episode as settled: a consensual affair from two decades ago that Newsom admitted, apologized for and has repeatedly acknowledged.
Others may focus more heavily now on the fact that Rippey was his subordinate and that her husband was one of his closest aides.
Rippey's new framing gives those voters a more complicated way to think about it.
She is not asking the public to erase her agency.
She is asking it not to erase his power.
That may be the most politically durable sentence in the entire controversy.
What the new account actually changes
Ruby Rippey's essay does not reveal that Gavin Newsom had a secret affair nobody knew about.
It does not accuse him of assault.
It does not say Kamala Harris threatened her into silence.
And it does not establish a coordinated Democratic conspiracy to suppress the story.
What it does is harder to dismiss.
It gives the person who absorbed some of the deepest private consequences of the affair a chance to describe the same event in her own words.
Her version says the relationship lasted longer than Newsom's shorthand suggests.
It says she, not Newsom, first told her husband.
It says her alcoholism and her choices were her responsibility, while also arguing that a mayor sleeping with a subordinate had an obligation to maintain a boundary he did not maintain.
And it says Harris's advice to wait before speaking was helpful to her recovery - not, in Rippey's telling, an act of intimidation.
For Newsom, the affair may still be a chapter he believes he has already answered for.
For Rippey, it was the event around which an entire life had to be rebuilt.
The political question heading toward 2028 is not whether the affair happened.
That was settled in 2007.
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The new question is whose version of what it meant voters find more revealing.
